Darren Watts

Re: Wold Newton Too recent. The game takes place in 1979, more or less, though I do swing a couple of years in either direction just to make a few jokes. But basically the game begins minutes after the ending of Phantom Of The Park. dw

Re: Wold Newton Sure! I wanted a female PC for the group, and the team needed a vehicles specialist, especially one who's pretty handy with a blowtorch, chainsaw and sledgehammer. Plus, Alice and Gene both produced albums of hers, so she clearly fit the setting... dw

Re: Wold Newton I'll get Mike KISS, Alice Cooper and Wendy O. Williams (as well as whatever else I still have he's missing) when I get back from the February con circuit. dw

Re: Champions Sneak Peek #3: Just For Fun What I like best about this pic is the little green plastic monkey-head top of Foxbat's soda. If a fast-food chain had those I'd get them all the time. dw

Re: Star Wars licence news... Heh. If the license is too expensive for WotC, I doubt it's anywhere near our ballpark. One can dream... dw

Re: Assuage my fears about the complexity Nobody who uses the word "assuage" in a sentence correctly will find Hero too complex to play.

Re: Spanish character naming help Fuego is okay. Antorcha (torch) or Infierno might work too. dw

Re: The Ultimate Base OK, sorry I missed this thread. Before rampant speculation gets out of control, there's nothing particularly mysterious about Base. We got it a bit earlier than we expected, just before XMas came along when it wasn't expected until afterwards, and a lot of people were on vacations. Several distributors,*including* Alliance, got their orders in a bit late for pretty much the same reasons. As of last week, everybody had gotten their orders in and been shipped, except the UK which we're still waiting on an order from. Alliance certainly should have the books by now, as should just about everybody else. We got plenty of orders (it's doing quite well, actually), nobody's refused it, it's just slightly-more-than-typical holiday season slowness. Hero has a hard enough time fighting rumors that start elsewhere on the Net- can we please try to at least keep this site full of accurate information? Many thanks, guys! dw

Re: Single Most Powerful Super Hero EVER!!! Didn't Batman once make a point of mentioning how lucky the world was that Ray Palmer was a good guy? dw

Re: Champions Sneak Peek #1: The Cover! Cryptic was fairly adamant, and rightly so IMO, that their new featured main cover art character not be somebody with hidden facial features. I'm with LL- it's a force field. dw

Re: Champions Sneak Peek #1: The Cover! Early February. We plan now to have the book at Dundracon, so we'll probably set it up in the store before we leave. dw

Re: The HERO System Advanced Player's Guide We have temporarily sold out of hard copies. Turns out the book was pretty popular. We're figuring out now how soon we can squeeze in a reprint, but the pending arrival of Champions is making said planning a little sketchy right now. dw

Re: Hulk write-up from Game Trade Magazine 2003 Heh. Well, thanks for the compliments, guys- I wrote that many years ago indeed. dw

Re: Wold Newton I'll have a bunch of musical ones from 2010 once I'm done writing it.

Re: Wold Newton Wold Newton has obviously been a massive influence on my own game worlds, particularly as shown in the annual Hero All-Stars con games. The only thing I tend to drop out is their obsessive fetish for making everybody related to each other- I'm happier in a world where remarkable people just spring up all over the place, and I don't particularly need a magical meteor to explain why some people have slightly superhuman abilities. I also drop out almost all references to published comicbook heroes, but that's just a personal taste- they've got plenty of their own settings, and a world where the greatest heroes are Doc Savage, the Shadow and Tarzan feels a little fresher to me in 2009 than having to grapple with Superman and Batman again. I do love the span of it all, and in the con games tend to simply pick a year for my story and then see who's around in it and whether they might fit; crashing Steve Austin, Buckaroo Banzai and KISS into Fantasy Island in 1982 in one game, sending Doc Savage and Nancy Drew to Skull Island in another, and having Sherlock Holmes and the Lone Ranger meet a Vampire Slayer and Peter Pan in 1886 in a third. dw

Re: How can you make the stone age cool? GURPS Fantasy II, by Robin Laws, is mostly stone age and made of cool. Insane gods, dangerous magic, and sticky fish games. dw

Re: Need Super powered Mysteries! Frame the superhero identity for some awful crime and have the secret identity get involved in the investigation to clear himself without giving his secret away. dw

Re: new to hero system Hi Sora, and welcome. The minimum required to play would be the new "6th Edition Basic" rulebook and a fistful of six-siders. Basic will teach you the fundamental elements of the game- in order to get the full experience, eventually you'll want to pick up the core 6th Edition rulebooks (Volumes I and II.) After that, well, it depends what kind of game you want- there are almost 100 supplements to choose from. dw

Re: day of ragnararok pulp? DAR could only be made pulpier by the addition of more wood shavings. My own mini-campaign featured Operator #5 as an NPC and had the PCs plundering Doc Savage's lab in order to find a tunneling machine. (It also featured Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty from Kerouac's "On The Road," and borrowed a bit of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol, specifically the Ant Hill under the Pentagon (which has five sides because it's a pentagram to keep the demons in, of course, and was designed by Thomas Carnacki.)) dw

Re: A Storeowner's First Impression Tell ya what, guys, how about we hold off on furthering this discussion until you've actually seen the books that are designed to bring in players unfamiliar with the Hero System, like Champions Online and Champions itself? I believe that many of you will have most of your concerns addressed by those... dw

Re: Lucha Libre artwork! Well, except for the dude with the axe and the inexplicable absence of Blue Demon, it *is* the plot for El Santo y Blue Demon Contra Los Monstruos (see our filmography.) dw

Re: And 6e print books start to arrive

Re: And 6e print books start to arrive According to Jason the last of the non-foreign preorders should go out tomorrow morning. Tomorrow afternoon is for dealing with the problem furriners. So if yours isn't showing as underway by, say, Monday, there's a problem and let Chez Walters know about it. dw

Hey guys! Now that 6th Ed is finally making its way to most of you, anybody want to write some reviews? We'd sure like to hear what you think, especially at sites like RPG.Net, ENWorld, etc. dw

Re: And 6e print books start to arrive Oh, believe me, it's not a question of respect or anything like that. I understand everybody's frustration, and I share it to a certain extent (and I greatly prefer it to the alternative of people not caring when their books show up!) I just don't want people leaping to the conclusion that there's something wrong with their orders when we know that 10% of them still haven't even left the warehouse (or whatever percentage we're down to today), and every request for info we get slows the process down that few minutes more. Ordinarily we're very fast getting products out- however, this single order has been more than six times as large as any we've *ever* done (remember, both 5th and 5ER were shipped by others, before we opened our warehouse.) If we bring it in in less than six times the average time, I'm still calling it a win. dw